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Thursday, March 7, 2013

My Cesarean Section Journal Entry

Sorry it's been a while. I've been crazy busy. One of my many projects is helping with some events that will be held in conjunction with C-section Awareness Month in April.

Now, you may be wondering, why do C-sections need a special month? Among other issues, one-in-three women who go to the hospital to have their child end up having a c-section. Only around 10% of all births need to end in c-sections. That means one-in-five mothers have had an unnecessary c-section. I'm one of them, although I don't have any ill-feelings toward my OB. I think my OB did it out of genuine concern for me and my son.

This picture has been making the rounds on the pro-life blogs, but I think it's a good pic for women recovering from unwanted c-sections, too. It's a baby about to be born via c-section holding on to the doctor's hand.

I'm sure I will talk about this again. I'm a sucker for shameless plugs and I want any and every reader to come see the display. But today I wanted to share with you the journal entry that I submitted for a CAM display that I'm participating in.

My cesarean birth scar reminds me that I never went into
labor. You can mourn just as hard for something you never had than for
something you lost. I felt lost, I still feel lost, sometimes when I remember
being pregnant and then I see this beautiful little boy in front of me. I
wonder where he came from. Is he mine? How did he get here? Didn’t I miss
something somewhere? You watch in the movies: the water breaks in the middle of
the night, my husband driving madly to the hospital, a few hours later I push
screaming obscenities. Wasn’t I supposed to go through all that? What happened?
Even a year later, I’m still preoccupied with the question, “Who does he look
like?” It is as if the fact that he looks like me proves he’s mine. I’m
grateful for the fact I got really sick when he was only 2-months-old. Getting
wheeled in to surgery again (unrelated to the C-section) helps you put your
life into perspective. I realized that it doesn’t matter how he came into the
world. In the end, when I’m on my deathbed, all that is going to matter is he
is my son. No, I don’t feel like I gave birth to him, but he’s still my child. One
thing that bugged me in my experience was that I could not get any spiritual
care as I waited for my C-section. I had not had surgery since I was 5-years-old.
I was depressed, confused, and scared. I am already trained as a hospital
chaplain specialized in hospice care. I am now working toward a specialization
on the other end of the life cycle, pregnancy and childbirth. I don’t want
other women to be lost and scared like me.